Breaking news on Twitter
Mengdie Hu Georgia Tech Shixia Liu MSR Asia Furu Wei MSR Asia Yingcai Liu UC Davis John Stasko Georgia Tech Kwan-Liu Ma UC Davis Twitter broke Osama Bin Laden’s death
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2 Twitter broke Osama Bin Laden’s death
9:45 pm: White House announces Pres. Obama speech
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3 Twitter broke Osama Bin Laden’s death
10:24 pm: Keith Urbahn tweets about Osama rumor
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4 Twitter broke Osama Bin Laden’s death
10:45 pm: ABC, NBC & CBS report Bin Laden’s death
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5 Twitter broke Osama Bin Laden’s death
11:30 pm: Pres. Obama begins remarks
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6 Prior Analysis
• Brian Stelter (New York Times): How the Bin Laden Announcement Leaked Out http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/how-the-osama-announcement-leaked-out/ • Gilad Lotan (SocialFlow): Breaking Bin Laden: Visualizing the Power of a Single Tweet http://blog.socialflow.com/post/5246404319/breaking-bin-laden-visualizing-the-power-of-a-single • Frédéric Filloux (Guardian): Lessons from the Osama bin Laden Coverage http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/may/09/lessons-from-bin-laden-coverage
7 Data
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8 Data
• May 1st 10:20 pm EST – May 2nd 12:20 am EST • “laden” • 614,976 tweets • Sampled (roughly 10%)
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9 Did Twitter Break the news? Tweets posted between 10:20 and 10:45 pm
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10 News breakers
@jacksonjk: Jill Jackson – CBS News Capitol Hill producer @keithurbahn: Keith Urbahn - Chief of staff of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld @brianstelter: Brian Stelter – New York Times reporter
1200 @keithurbahn 1000 @jacksonjk 800 600 @brianstelter 400
200 Mentions per min per Mentions 0 22:21 22:23 22:25 22:28 22:30 22:33 22:35 22:37 22:39 22:41 22:43 22:45 Time
11 News breakers
1200 @keithurbahn 1000 @jacksonjk 800 600 @brianstelter 400 10:24 pm 10:32 pm
200 Mentions per min per Mentions 0 22:21 22:23 22:25 22:28 22:30 22:33 22:35 22:37 22:39 22:41 22:43 22:45 Time
12 Did Twitter convince its audience?
• All English Tweets in data set: 420,134 • Certainty classification – Certain: They caught Osama Bin Laden! – Uncertain: Rumor, Bin Laden dead. Don’t know for sure. – Irrelevant: Obama: "the US is not – and never will be – at war with Islam…Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer...“ • Classifier – Training set: 300 tweets, 2 raters agreed on 235 (78.3%) – SVM with bag-of-words as features – Cross-validation: 75.8% overall confidence
13 Did Twitter convince its audience?
Keith Urbahn ABC, NBC and CBS Obama speech 1
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2 as certain as
0
% of tweets classified tweets of %
0:00 0:05 0:10 0:15
23:09 23:37 22:21 22:28 22:35 22:41 22:46 22:51 22:55 22:59 23:02 23:06 23:13 23:16 23:20 23:23 23:27 23:30 23:34 23:41 23:45 23:48 23:52 23:56 Time
14 Did Twitter convince its audience?
Keith Urbahn ABC, NBC and CBS Obama speech 1
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2 as certain as
0
% of tweets classified tweets of %
0:00 0:05 0:10 0:15
23:09 23:37 22:21 22:28 22:35 22:41 22:46 22:51 22:55 22:59 23:02 23:06 23:13 23:16 23:20 23:23 23:27 23:30 23:34 23:41 23:45 23:48 23:52 23:56 Time
29.91% tweets @keithurbahn contains “Rumsfeld” 18.61% tweets @jacksonjk contains “CBS” 20.74% tweets @briansteler contains “NYT”
15 Who generated the buzz?
• 100 accounts mentioned in 18.10% of sampled tweets
Mainstream media 26 @cnn, @nytimes, @cnnbrk Media people 18 @jacksonjk, @brianstelter Twitter celebrities 16 @nzafro, @yourfavwhiteguy Real-life celebrities 15 @stevemartintogo, @kimkardashianb Blogs 6 @realmorte, @ugglytruth Political people & org 4 @barackobama, @whitehouse “Osama”, “Jesus” 4 @real_bin_laden, @osamabinladen News aggregators 3 @breakingnews, @usabreakingnews Others 5 @jtalarico328, @realliltunechii
16 Who generated the buzz?
3500 mass media 3000
media people 2500 celebrities 2000
1500
1000 Mentions per min per Mentions
500
0 22:21 22:43 22:57 23:09 23:21 23:32 23:45 23:57 0:14 Time
17 What did people share?
• 9.69% tweets contain links • Top 26 sites made up 58.8% of total valid links
URL number / tweet number 0.18 0.16 0.14 0.12 0.1 0.08 0.06 0.04 0.02
0
0:00 0:05 0:10 0:15
22:21 23:23 22:28 22:35 22:41 22:46 22:51 22:55 22:59 23:02 23:06 23:09 23:13 23:16 23:20 23:27 23:30 23:34 23:37 23:41 23:45 23:48 23:52 23:56
18 0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 4500 cnn.com msn.com nytimes.com twitpic.com yfrog.com globo.com twitlonger.com youtube.com tumblr.com reuters.com tmi.me lockerz.com mashable.com go.com bbc.co.uk wsj.com facebook.com whitehouse.gov huffingtonpost.com Mass media and government 64.07% aljazeera.net yahoo.com Video & image sharing, social networks, google.com 35.93% foxnews.com blogs and tweet-shortening services uol.com.br blogspot.com globovision.com
19 Discussion
• People are willing to trust information from social media – if the sources are credible • Concentration of attention on “elite users” • Different groups of elite users play different parts • Journalists utilize personal social media accounts to “break” news
20 Associated Press Staff Scolded for Tweeting Too Quickly About OWS Arrests The official rules note, "Don’t break news that we haven’t published, no matter the format." (Reuters spells out the same idea plainly in their handbook: "Don't scoop the wire.") Instead of getting "caught in the moment," the AP's freewheeling tweeters are urged in the e-mail to run "sensitive official AP business" through editors and corporate communications. The AP's social media guidelines were recently updated to insist, "Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day.” http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/11/ap-staff-scolded-for-tweeting-about-ows-arrests.html
Breaking news guidance for BBC journalists “But we've been clear that our first priority remains ensuring that important information reaches BBC colleagues, and thus all our audiences, as quickly as possible - and certainly not after it reaches Twitter.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2012/02/twitter_guidelines_for_bbc_jou.html
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